


Within me there lay an invincible summer

by feyrelay



Series: Call Me By Your Name Fix-It [1]
Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Artist!Elio, Bottom Oliver, Depressed!Oliver, Emotional Infidelity, Fandom Trumps Hate, LGBTQ Jewish Character(s), M/M, Post-Canon Fix-It, Role Reversal, Switching, Years Later
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-14
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:34:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,213
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22251175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feyrelay/pseuds/feyrelay
Summary: COMPLETE.Oliver learns that normalcy and the trodden path are no vaccine against failure. Elio shows up, at just the right-wrong moment, to forgive him.(Thank you so much to my auction-winner for being so flexible with me submitting this a few weeks late; it's been a hell of a year, and you've been so supportive. FTH brought us together, but your kindness and sense of humor and overall fabulosity are what's made us friends.)
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s), Oliver/Elio Perlman
Series: Call Me By Your Name Fix-It [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1607935
Comments: 30
Kudos: 103
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2019





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Binary_Sunset](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Binary_Sunset/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic has a little mini playlist, [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3BAgxf8iCCITn8uJgNTbaM?si=vTRwnBHsSnGq307soQrE-A).

The thing about New York, after Italy, is how loud it is. So much of what Oliver likes in his life is meant to be done quietly. He likes reading, he likes writing, he likes making love, he likes to eat quickly and without much conversation. He loves listening to music, but not the kind of music he often hears in the city, not unless he’s bought tickets to something he can’t afford.

Well, actually, that’s not precisely true. Oliver hears plenty of tunes worth dancing to. There’s a boombox on every corner these days, even as the post-holiday chill seeps into his neighborhood. He jives and jams walking down the street, particularly when he’s taken a new way to school and knows no one knows him here. It fits neatly in that little January box in his brain that says ‘you need to be more active, exercise, keep your body nice before the wedding’. It keeps him warm.

But it’s not what he _loves_. It’s not what shocks him with beauty. It’s just nice, just okay.

He never realized how hard it is—once you’ve gone wild—to go back.

***

He gets married.

***

Two years pass.

***

A student, drunk as a skunk, slumps into the fountain at Columbia, just as Oliver is rounding the corner to the quad. He’d been passed out on the ledge, Oliver supposes, and just rolled over.

Oliver rushes forward, all jumped up from his pre-work caffeine and no small amount of adrenaline. He pushes his warm muscles through the cold, clearing distance quickly. Well, he knows it _must_ be quickly, at his height; it doesn’t keep him from feeling so slow, like he’s moving through honey.

He manages to get the poor kid out of the water—it’s really too cold for this—and Oliver gets him successfully on his back on the brickwork surrounding the fountain. He’s not breathing.

Oliver tips the younger man’s head back, checks that his airway is clear, and gives him the kiss of life. It takes a few rounds of this, alternating with compressions, just in case. (Oliver’s hands are shaking too much to take an accurate pulse; he won’t admit that he forgot to, in the first place.)

For a moment, he really thinks it’s okay. A pulse of vomit and fountain water glugs out of the sandy-haired student’s mouth, and Oliver fully expects it to be followed by the sucking sound of air being taken in.

A girl runs up to him in a red coat, even, and Oliver shoos her to go call 911. “He’s out of the woods, I think, but he’ll need someone to pick him up. Might as well be the professionals, don’t you think?” he says rhetorically, and with authority. She scurries off.

Then a moment passes and he realizes that his charge still hasn’t opened his eyes or taken a breath under his own power, and time shifts ever so slightly to the left and Oliver kisses the still figure again, pushing—no, _blowing_ —air almost aggressively down the other man’s throat. He tastes the remnants of vomit, and blocks it out because. Because. It’s not the first time he’s kissed against the bitter tang of illness and felt like it was a matter of life or death. Of course, Elio had been alive and awake and not dying, he’d been consenting and eager and Oliver had wanted their bodies to have no secrets from each other, no matter how disgusting, so that was infinitely preferable, but-

Oliver can _do_ this. He _has_ to. He can save this person’s life.

(He doesn’t.)

There is an inquiry. Oliver learns things like: less than half of people who receive CPR survive. He learns that the student had asthma, and that the shock of cold water filling his lungs, along with the alcohol poisoning, had probably meant his fate was sealed before Oliver even reached him. He learns that the kid was named Michael, and that Oliver had accidentally broken his ribs while pushing on his lifeless chest.

He could have gone his whole life without knowing any of that, without the paramedic slapping his shoulder with the same hand that had just closed Michael’s eyes. He would have happily run parallel to this knowledge his entire life, never knowing Michael existed or that he would cease existing on this particular day.

 _It’s a normal situation_ , he’s told. _You did the best that anyone could expect of you, son; most people have never even heard of cardio-pulmonary resuscitation._

‘Normal’ is suddenly a very ugly word.

***

Later, when his belly has grown a little soft with depression and the desperate comfort foods his wife keeps feeding him, Oliver receives a card in the mail. It is hand-drawn, with a man blowing a shofar done in bright colors and Cubism on the front. _If Picasso_ _were a Jew,_ Oliver thinks.

He’d forgotten it was Yom Kippur this week, to be honest. He wonders who wants to reconcile, and whether they want to do so with him, or with God. He doesn’t know anyone in the city who both a) celebrates anything other than Chanukah, _and_ b) would have the flair required to craft such an offering. Everyone he knows is either too cool to be traditional, or too traditional to be cool.

Then he notices the man blowing the shofar has a scrap of a shirt—in actual fabric—glued to him. And not just that, but out of the fabric two careful circles are punched out, above where his heart would be. Oliver finds them; they’ve been used to pick out the color of the man’s blue eyes.

Inside, the card says: _I’m sorry, I literally rent my/your/our clothes in my grief. You’d tell me that’s dramatic. But I miss Mikey, and I miss you. I’m glad you tried to save him. -Elio_

Oliver sits down, hard.

When his wife gets home, she chides him for not having eaten. She reminds him the holiday isn’t for days, yet. He says he’s turning over a new leaf and trying to lose the gut. She kisses him.

Oliver tastes bile.

***

There’s a return address.

***

She wants to have a baby, she says.


	2. Chapter 2

Oliver tells his wife that one of his students has an ill grandmother who they need help supervising during the fast. He gives far too many details, telling her that the old woman is adamant about observing the holiest day of the year, and that the rabbi is concerned for the preservation of her life and wants them to make sure she takes water, at the very least. He even spins a yarn about the student pulling him aside to ask for help after noticing Oliver’s necklace. He doesn’t know why he adds that, or any of it. She simply nods, and wishes him a good fast, and says she’s going to her sister’s if he won’t be there. She says she’ll bring him a bagel, or a slice of coffee cake, when it’s over.

It felt important, though, to tell her. He needs there to be a narrative to this, even if it’s false.

Instead, Oliver finds the little flat that belongs to the return address. It’s a cold-water walk-up he’s warned by a man at the mailboxes, when he stares at the names too long, searching for Perlman. He wonders at this, at where Elio’s parents’ money has gone, but figures he’ll either be told or he won’t. It would be impolite to ask.

Of course, it had been rather impolite to fuck their seventeen-year-old son while he’d been in their home to do academic work, but that’s neither here nor there.

“I didn’t think cold-water flats even existed anymore. What is this, the nineteen-forties?”

Elio frowns, opening the door the rest of the way. “What? Oh, that’s Doug. We have a system.”

“A system for what?”

“If he doesn’t recognize a man looking for me, he tells them there’s no hot water; the ones who intend to screw usually balk at not being able to clean up comfortably, after, you know? The ones who want to buy art offer me a little extra, tell me to move somewhere nicer.”

Oliver gapes. Somehow he hadn’t pictured Elio ever being this… cavalier.

“All’s well that ends well, right?” Elio finishes his thought, with a small smile. It falters a little, though. “I guess you got my card?”

“I didn’t know you did that kind of art.”

Elio appears to consider that. “I didn’t either, when you knew me.”

Oliver steps forward, and turns on the charm. He can do this. He has to. “Don’t worry about the shirt; I’m sure it’s seen better days by now.” He makes a show of looking around at the dropcloth that is everywhere. “I’m also curious to know how Doug,” and he says the name with a doubtful gesture, “knew I was looking for you, specifically.”

“You must have told him what floor, or been looking at all the third-floor boxes, maybe? I have the whole level; this is the studio and I use the other flat to actually live in.”

Oliver nods like that makes sense. It does, for Elio, he supposes. That answers the question of where Mama and Papa’s money is going. Then, Oliver’s brain catches up to the rest of the information he’s been given.

"I'm sorry, you're saying 'screw' now? Men who come to screw? _Men_?" 

"What would you prefer? Boink? Bone? Bump uglies with?" Elio asks artfully.

Oliver is at a loss, and hates the feeling. He prefers to be in control. He rarely asks this many questions in a row. "Are you going alphabetically? You _are,_ aren't you?" 

"I said," Elio insists, dark eyes glittering with cruelty (though Oliver isn't sure whose), "what would you prefer?" 

"Women," Oliver snaps. "I would prefer women."

Elio has turned away, examining one of his own paintings. "Ah."

"Does that bother you?" 

"No."

"No?" Oliver asks, allowing some incredulousness into his voice. 

"No," Elio murmurs. "You didn't say 'my wife'. You said, 'I _would_ prefer women'. Not 'I _do_ prefer my wife'." The younger man begins flipping through dry, stacked canvases that lean against the wall, as if looking for something. Then he looks up. "You didn't even say her name."

"It's Debbie."

"I know what it is."

Oliver finally gets over himself, legs tired from the walk over, and sits down on the floor. Deb's been driving him to school these past few months; the walk is a bit much to face in the morning on top of work.

"Are you okay? We could go to the other flat. I _have_ furniture."

Oliver smooths a hand through his hair. "And hot water?" 

"And hot water," Elio confirms. He stops his idle flipping through the paintings and steps forward, holds out his hand to help Oliver up.

***

He could leave. He could be good. He could ensure that his name is inscribed in the Book of Life for another year.

***

Oliver stays. It's a nice apartment, on the inside.

***

Nothing happens, not really.

They sit through Yom Kippur and don't-eat, don't-touch, don't-talk. Well, they do talk because silence is unbearable, but they say very little about anything that matters.

As he's leaving, they hug. Oliver is embarrassed for Elio to feel how soft he's grown around the middle. He tries to keep their torsos and hips apart, making an A-frame of their bodies. 

Elio smashes them together all the same, stronger than he looks. "Tu as l'air bien," he says politely, sounding like his mother. "Tu es beau, Oliver," he adds, sounding like himself.

Oliver murmurs, "Merci, mon ami," because it's just about all the French he can remember at that moment, hours of practice the past two years be damned. Elio inclines his head at him, awkwardly, until Oliver realizes he is the awkward one for not leaving. He's standing there on the threshold like a complete lemming. 

"Do you want to come back inside?" the other man asks him carefully.

"No," he says, because that's the same in French and English and that seems easier somehow. He walks down the two flights of stairs, nods to Doug who is back at his post and reading the newspaper by the mailboxes, and bursts out into the anonymity of this part of town so he can finally, finally sob. 

He ends up hailing a cab, though, because this whole experience has reminded him of how very possible it is that he and Elio might have New York friends in common, although he's not sure if he can count the boy whose ribs he'd cracked as a friend. 

When he gets home, Debbie is there. It's a shock of cold water to his lungs. "I thought you were leaving."

She frowns, though he swears to himself he didn't mean it to sound so accusatory. "I haven't left yet. I love my sister, but I don't want to be there overnight. No one loves anyone that much."

"Oh," he says. He wonders if that includes him.

She must notice he's been crying though he's done his best to hide it. "Did the old woman die? Is that why you're back so quickly?" 

_Is it quickly?_ he thinks but doesn't say. _It felt like hours._

"She refused to eat no matter what we did. They took her to the hospital, where it might as well be the professionals who have to try and make her."

Debbie hums sympathetically. "What was the lady's name?" 

He blanks, inhaling deep as he puts on a show of being easygoing. Oliver runs a hand through his hair. "Michelle."

"Odd name, for an older woman. Sounds young," Deb murmurs, rustling the Wednesday paper. 

He thinks of Elio, strong and more handsome than when he left him last, with his two apartments and his stack of paintings and his system with the neighborhood nib to manage his many gentleman callers.

"Not as young as you might think."

***

He goes back on the weekend, because he suspects Deb might be ovulating. He says he's going to stay for a night with an old friend who's moved back to New York from where they met in Italy, so that makes it okay. As long as Oliver tells the truth, he'll be okay. He can do this. He has to. 

"A _female_ friend?" Deb asks archly, playing at suspicion. She's smiling, though. 

"No, of course not," he says through the mirror as he dresses, straightening his shirt. "You're the only woman I love."

"I had better be, mister."

He turns to face her. Her lips are a little chapped from late September winds, but she is still very beautiful, very kissable. He loves her very much. "You always will be," he says warmly, meaning it. He hopes she feels it. 

(It feels a bit like depositing all his spare cash in the bank moments before he writes a rent check.) 

She smiles that bank teller's smile at him. "Oh dear, if you're going to be on that side of town, do look in on Michelle. Unless they've released her by now. I hope she's well."

It takes him a minute to place her request. "Oh, yes. I hope she's well too. I will," he promises.

***

With that rolling around in his mind all the way to Elio's neighborhood, Oliver all but vomits his questions as soon as the younger man opens the door to the studio flat. 

"How did you know Michael?" 

Elio looks him up and down, that pinched and vulturous look in his eyes, the one he used to get that summer when something went precisely the opposite of how he'd wanted it to. "Let's go get a drink." He picks up a backpack from the small table near the door, and slings it over his shoulder.

Oliver leans on the doorframe with one palm. He doesn't like how the other man is blocking his access to the apartment with his small frame. "Are you even old enough to drink, here?"

"I'm 19," Elio points out. "This is New York."

"They're thinking about changing that, you know. Because of the feds." It makes Oliver feel better, more in control, to have some bit of knowledge to share.

"Then we ought to hurry," Elio says with an air of sarcastic seriousness. He's staring, lifting his chin into an echo of the arch Oliver is making with his hulking tallness, boxing him in. _Move,_ says the younger man's expression. _Move so I can move. Standing still makes me nervous._

Oliver takes his hand away from the door, steps backward neatly like he's the woman dancing a ballroom dance. "We don't want to waste so much time," he agrees, "but where should we go?"

Elio slides past him, turning his shoulders a little as he goes for the stairs.

"I know a place."


	3. Chapter 3

The place that Elio knows turns out to be perfect, in that no one Oliver is acquainted with will ever chance upon them here. Then again, he’s sure they’d say the same about him. The world has so many secrets from itself.

This bar is one of them; it’s in a basement, though there are enough little lights criss-crossed amongst the skeleton of the overhead subfloor that Oliver could be forgiven for thinking they’d walked through an open archway at the bottom of the steps and not a door. It’s almost as if they were still outside, except for how the New York sky is never this empty of architecture or this full of stars.

If they were in Crema, maybe.

(If they were in Crema, a lot of things, maybe.)

Oliver has the strangest feeling of having an out of body experience as he’s led through the throng of dancers to a shitty little bar. There’s no room to sit for fear of being elbowed by those ordering. He likes it.

Elio orders confidently, though the drinks come back frozen and blue. “Try it, you’ll like it.”

Oliver is doubtful. “It’s freezing!”

“It’s fresh.”

They make their way to a corner away from the dancefloor and carve out seats. Oliver wastes no more time. He has to know. “Who was Michael to you?”

Elio sips his fruity drink; it makes his face look blue—drowned—from the reflection and the uplighting. “It’s complicated.”

Oh. (Oh _no._ )

Apparently, he has killed Elio’s lover, and not for the first time if he counts the suicide of his other self. His abnormal self, his parallel self who was never supposed to cross the ocean. Oliver doesn’t know what to say. “How did you know it was me, who- who found him?”

“His parents. We’re friends,” he is told casually.

“Of course you are.”

Elio almost laughs at him. Oliver can feel it on the tip of his own tongue, but then the younger man pulls out a pack of smokes and offers him one. “Hm?”

“No, no thank you. I don’t smoke.”

Elio puts the pack away. “My mistake. _Mea culpa._ ”

He considers his drinking partner. “That’s new. I’ve never known you to apologize, or be so considerate.”

“You’ve never known me at all,” he says snappishly. Then he sobers. “You can thank Marzia. You left; she was still there. We hurt each other, then forgave. I learned a bit. D’you want another drink?” And he’s up before Oliver can ask, or beg, for something not-blue.

Honestly, he’s not sure it would have helped anyway, They both end up drinking far too much, and Oliver loses the self-consciousness that comes along with the new sway to his post-marriage body. He dances until he’s sweating, but Elio doesn’t dance with him or even near him.

Instead, the cherry of his cigarette is the spot that Oliver looks for every time he spins around, and it keeps him steady, undizzy, sane.

At the end of the night, they stumble back to the third floor of Elio’s building. Oliver leans Elio against his own door, finally feeling like _himself_ again, feeling powerful. “I told my wife I was staying with a friend for the night,” he whispers against Elio’s pale, pale forehead. 

There’s a tinkling sound as the younger man expertly unlocks his door without turning around. He makes a little moue of pain at the way he has to twist his wrist to do so, and Oliver is compelled to drop to his knees and take said wrist and kiss at the fine bones there.

Elio draws back almost immediately, stepping backwards. “You can sleep in the studio. The key is taped to the back of the painting in the hall. There are, er, blankets, I think? And a pillow in one of the closets. You’ve seen the couch, s’not so bad. There might be a dropcloth over it.”

Oliver cranes his neck, leaning back on his haunches, to look for said painting. “Is that one of yours?” It’s an abstract still life, of peaches. Oliver is too drunk to fully contain his laughter.

Elio’s expression grows hard. “D’you think I’d tape shit to someone else’s art? Also, don’t.” He uncurls the back of his knee from Oliver’s grasp and shuts the door in his face.

They don’t go out again.

***

Oliver forges his wife’s signature on the paperwork needed to get a vasectomy, without her knowing. Not even his old pal from pre-med, before he switched to studying Classics, would do it for him without. He gets a referral for a cardiopulmonary specialist, too, who puts him through his paces with a stress test. He finds out his max heart rate is somewhere around 200 bpm, and he tries to achieve that every day.

He figures if it kills him, it kills him.

***

Four months pass before Deb puts two-and-two together, before she realizes he’d shaved an intimate area, gone away for his day off, and come back sore to fruitlessly make love to her without initiating any more careful talks about family planning. It helps-hurts that she jimmies his locked desk drawer open with a letter opener, and finds a copy of the paperwork with her name on it.

She leaves him. He lives.

***

They talk on the phone; it feels safer that way. Elio doesn’t have a phone in his apartment, he recalls, so he calls the downstairs bagel shop at what he hopes is their least busy time of day, and asks if the man there knows the artist who lives on the third floor.

“Skinny kid? Leaves crumbs all over my shop like a spoiled brat and asks for extra cream cheese?

“That’ll be the one. Forgive him, he’s an only child.”

Oliver waits. He puts his hand to the side of his neck to check his own pulse.

“Hello?”

“If I told you I wanted to see you, that I can’t live without you, would you feel the same?” Oliver asks plainly. He has too little energy to be suave or guarded.

There is a shaky breath down the line. "It's not that I can't live without this. I'm not. I'm not the selfish boy I was that summer. I have other things in my life now, just like you."

Oliver has a raucous hope, all of a sudden, setting up rhythm in his chest. "But?"

"But when I see myself in others' faces, reflected, it's not right. It's how things look underwater: too big, too small, too bent."

"So what are you asking? I'm married. Or does that matter to you?" Oliver inquires. He doesn’t want Elio to know that he and his wife are over, yet. He wants to hear the decision without that taken into consideration. He wants to know if the selfish, desiring Elio is still in there somewhere, or if Oliver killed him, too.

"So what are you saying, you're married? You're married; I'm unmoored. You’re the one who called. You threw out the line."

"Don't be dramatic."

"I can only see myself clearly when I'm with you. Like the difference between a mirror and a photograph. Everyone says a photograph is more real, more helpful, that it lasts longer," Elio extemporizes, clearly not prepared for this conversation.

"But you prefer the mirror, you vain thing," he teases. A moment after, Oliver wishes he could take it back. They’re not there yet, maybe.

"I prefer paintings. You're not you, you're me. How could God be angry that I love myself? How could he be angry that I appreciate his own colors, and his own craft?"

Oliver bites his lip. "Is the bagel man listening?”

“No, this time of day they mince the onions, so he’s trying not to cry in the other room.”

It’s the kind of detail only Elio would know, and it reminds Oliver all over again that the other man has his own ecosystem now, his own acculturation that has nothing to do with Oliver at all. 

He wants in, though. “I feel what you feel. I care for you like a wound on my own body. This isn't infidelity; it's self-preservation."

There is a long pause. “Come to the studio; I have something for you.”

_Click._


	4. Chapter 4

All the way there, Oliver comes up with smooth things to say. He’ll have to explain about Debbie, and once upon a time he’d have thought Elio would never question him. He thinks about the way Elio is now, with his mentions of Marzia and Chiara, though. It’s nerve-wracking.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting. A painting, maybe. Elio laid out naked on a dropcloth would be nice. Instead, when he finally makes it to the flat, the door is open. Doug is there.

“Knock knock?” he says uncertainly. He plays up his goofiness, feigning sheepishness for Doug’s benefit.

“Hey,” he is greeted, and then the two other men go back to poring over a large cloth that takes up more of the flat’s floor than should strictly be allowed.

“What’s this?” Oliver inquires, unsure if he means the… blanket? Or the fact that they’re not alone.

“You ever heard of Harvey Milk, friend?” Doug starts, but Elio shoves him. It’s funny to think about, but it’s the first time Oliver’s ever seen Elio touch anyone who isn’t Marzia, or his parents.

“C’mon, don’t tell the whole story. It’s a quilt square, for Mikey.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“Our friend in San Francisco called. He wants to start this thing, for all the AIDS victims. Something for them to be remembered by,” Doug continues explaining, but Oliver needs to hear this from Elio. His chest is tight, too tight.

“He drowned. I- I broke his ribs. The asthma and the cold… they told me there wasn’t anything I could do, really. Elio, I’m so sorry. I know that you-”

He’s met with a snort. “You don’t know shit, Oliver. Did they really tell you he had asthma?”

Doug looks up from the dark blue cloth at that. “No shit? Jesus. Try chronic pneumonia, brought on by immunodeficiency.”

Elio looks at him significantly. “If I was in a worse mood, I’d say I’m surprised you gave him mouth-to-mouth. But I won’t insult you.”

“Gee, what’s stopped you before?” Oliver asks absently, finally taking in the fabric before him. In the corner of his eye, Elio finally cracks a genuine smile, the first Oliver’s seen from him in three years. “So, wait. What you’re saying is-”

Elio stands. After a beat, Doug does too, though he steps slightly to his left, until he’s no longer between them. There is nothing to insulate him from Elio’s candid, “It’s not your fault, Oliver.”

He doesn’t know what to say to that, not really.

“It wasn’t anyway, mind,” says Doug, casually. “Mikey always  _ was _ a walking disaster. If it wasn’t AIDS, it woulda been something else. And I know it’s not exactly kosher to say it, not these days, but fuck condoms. He was worth it. Every minute with him was worth it, no matter how much pain it brought later. We were in love.”

His head is spinning. He’d thought-

Oliver looks to Elio for confirmation. The younger man is smiling, just a little. “Even if it was your fault, which it wasn’t, I’d forgive you,” he says quietly. “I’m precocious like that. Wise beyond my years, you might say.”

“Shut the fuck up,” says Oliver, elbowing Doug out of the way to kiss the life out of one Elio Perlman. It’s the first time anyone else has ever witnessed this. In fact, the last time Oliver kissed anyone in public was his wedding. This is better. This is more than something performative and overwrought and decorated. This is more than something Debbie is going to let him do, because it’s the moment for it, and it’s more than what went on in Italy, when it was all a race against the clock.

This is Elio, not just ready for him, but reaching out to catch him too.

“Debbie and I are getting divorced,” he mumbles. It seems like something Elio would want to know.

“I forgive you for that, too.”

The door to the flat closes behind a fleeing Doug. Neither of them pays it much mind.

“Later,” Elio calls. Oliver laugh-cries into his shoulder.

***

Later is when Oliver finally gets a chance to take in the quilt square, after scales have fallen from his eyes and Elio is no longer the only thing he can see. It’s a beautiful tangle of starburst-like lights picked out in blue fabric, stitched with silver thread. The starlights themselves have been batik’d over in watercolors by Elio, to simulate a rainbow of prismatic refraction.

“It’s the ceiling at the bar we went to; it’s where Mikey and Doug met. I set them up. Doug was my neighbor, here in the studio before it was a studio. He, uh, moved out, after everything.”

Oliver kisses him again, because he sounds sad and because he can.

***

The blue fabric of the lights, it turns out, is scraps of his old shirt. It doesn’t matter, since it’s for a good cause, and the shirt wouldn’t fit him anymore anyway. It belongs to the other Oliver.

***

It is summer again before Oliver feels right letting Elio pull his shirt off over his head for him. It’s not really that his body has changed that much; the change is likely only perceptible to him, especially with the way he’s taken the exercise craze to heart. But it’s always been true that Elio is all delicate yet masculine beauty, harsh angles and soft, pale planes. Oliver doesn’t know how to compete with that without summer’s heat and golden light to flatter him again.

Once his clothes are off, he watches Elio watch him from the narrow bed in the other flat. “Speak. Speak or die,” he demands.

“Tu as l’air bien,” Elio shrugs, though it quickly morphs to a smirk. He’s messing with him. Oliver takes a half-step forward, soft dick tapping the top of his thigh with the movement. Elio puts his hands up, which upsets his balance and causes his head to collapse the pillow under him. “Tu es beau, Oliver. Toujours,” he murmurs from his back, face nearly hidden by the pillow.

That won’t do. Oliver wants to see his face, and he also remembers his French this time. He clambers up on the bed so he can see what Elio is thinking. “Tu m’aimes? Est-ce que tu m’aimes encore?”

Elio sticks his tongue out. “English, for this?”

Oliver draws back, with a frown this time. That wasn’t an answer.

Realizing his mistake, Elio props himself up on his elbow, ripping the overstuffed pillow out from under said elbow and tossing it to the floor like an only child. “I said ‘toujours’ didn’t I? I know you know it means ‘always’. Of course I love you.”

“Hmmm,” Oliver hums. It’s not perfect, not precisely what he wanted. The old him would have thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The current Oliver speaks, and endures that indignity for the purpose of preserving his life, with all its ups and downs. “Say it again.”

Elio relaxes back and looks up at him, bratty, and for a moment Oliver thinks that his bravery won’t be rewarded. He expects stubborn silence.

“Elio,” the younger man whispers. There is a dimple for punctuation to that simple pronouncement.

That can be enough, for now. “Oliver,” Oliver answers.

And he finds he's smiling too.


	5. Chapter 5

They have a perfect summer, Elio and Oliver, Oliver and Elio. This time, it is Oliver who is the one being taught the ways of the world, and he finds he likes it; he has never met so many other gay or bisexual people before, women too, and a whole host of other people whom Oliver tries really, very hard to define politely in his mind until one of these said people reaches out and lights his cigarette for him. "Don't worry about it, sugar," they say. "I can tell you're trying to figure me out but I'll be damned if you do before I do, so maybe stop thinking so much and just worship me as I am? I'll be something else tomorrow but I'll still be me and you'll still be enamored of our resident starving artist… so unless Elio has gotten better at sharing these days, I think it's probably _never_ that our 'twains' shall ever meet, if you know what I mean," and that makes it easier.

"It's a kind of family, isn't it?" Elio asks in his ear as they dance together. It is so strange to touch him where anyone can see. It is a thrill of the highest order.

He likes that they speak, though. He likes that Elio never lets him drift too far away in his mind, when he starts thinking of all the time he let pass without this. 

"You know," Oliver says back, casually hitching Elio up his own body as they move to the music, so he can manage to slide his hands into Elio's back pockets without hunching, "it was your family that made me want to have a family of my own. I never wanted that before. If anything, this is all your fault."

Elio has nothing but contemptuous sarcasm for that. "It's our fault for... what are you saying? Being too wonderful?"

Oliver regards him steadily. "Yes. Precisely."

And they kiss and kiss and kiss and kiss.

***

They don't sleep together, though. They do everything else together. Laundry. Shopping. Smoking. Dancing. Exercise. Oliver often showers while Elio drinks coffee from a cereal bowl and sits on the toilet; coffee goes right through him. Oliver peeks around the brightly colored fish that dot the clear, plastic shower curtain and tries to help with the crossword.

Elio helps him come up with a curriculum for his Classical Myth and Critical Thought seminar that is more than just Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, and so on. It will help, Elio says, to throw in some works he can point to later, if the powers that be ask where all the 'normal' love stories are. “Some people are gay, Oliver,” Elio says wisely. “And some people aren’t.”

Oliver includes a couple of days on the linking of the _Heptaméron_ collection, which contains the story of the knight and the princess, and Ovid's _Metamorphoses._ He uses the phone that Elio finally deigns to have installed in the right hand apartment—and not the studio! God forbid!—to call Annella and tell her. "However did you sneak that into the curriculum, you clever man?" she asks.

"They're both frame stories," Oliver explains with genuine excitement. "It's important for students to know how stories and philosophies evolve when one segment of a framed story or a set of essays is discarded by a culture that no longer finds it useful, and another is subbed in on the next retelling or printing."

Elio watches him, sitting on the back of their new couch in no shirt, smoking, and wearing thick sweatpants that make plasticy swooshing sounds when he rubs his knees together. Oliver looks at his bony, birdlike ankles sticking out underneath the thickly elasticized cuffs. He's ugly as sin like this, and Oliver loves him. 

In his ear, Annella says, "Yes, I think that will resonate well with your students. They can probably relate to wanting to keep some traditions as they build their new adult lives, even while they throw others out, good riddance to bad rubbish." She says it in just the way she says things, sometimes, so kind and pointed and knowing and loving and Oliver goes silent. 

“Indeed!” calls Elio’s father, clearly listening in at his wife’s side. He speaks to Oliver like he is a family member, again. It’s very healing. Something turns over in Oliver’s mind.

He’s ready now. Now. He’s ready. He can do this, although he doesn’t have to. He wants to.

Oliver hangs up the phone and advances on Elio without a second thought. The younger man looks up from where he was examining his own bare feet against the emerald green chenille of the sofa. _He was probably thinking of a painting,_ Oliver reasons with an infinite fondness.

“Were you composing your next canvas, little Picasso?” Oliver asks, even as his voice settles into that register that he knows Elio likes. Oliver can’t believe his insecurity has made them wait this long. What was he thinking? He gets to his knees in front of the couch, and thumbs at Elio’s ankles.

“No, a song,” Elio informs him with a little quirk of a grin. “It’s been a while.”

At first Oliver marvels at the way they appear to be on the same page; it _has_ been a while since he’s been with anyone. Then he realizes Elio must be referring to music. At that moment, the phone rings. Annella probably thought they were disconnected. This is more important, though. “You haven’t composed since…”

“Since,” Elio confirms succinctly, as if that were a full sentence. “Yes.”

“Oh.” Oliver pulls a foot into his hands, rests it just below his left shoulder, on his chest. “A _passerotto_ , then, not a Picasso, not tonight. My little sparrow. I. I’m really sorry, kid.”

But Elio shakes his head against that too, curls flying even as he slides down to thump onto the couch proper, Oliver still between his legs. The sweatpants swish against the chenille. Oliver thinks they might have belonged to him, once, actually.

“No. Not a Picasso. A Pylades, a Patrocles,” he murmurs. He is far more confident and coy than Oliver has ever seen him. It’s nice. “Are you going to call my mother back, though?”

He pushes at the elastic of the sweatpants, revealing pale calves as he goes higher and higher until the pants puff and bunch at Elio’s knees. “If you prefer it,” Oliver says easily. “I can.”

“No, don’t,” Elio instructs, but all Oliver hears is: _Yes, please. Yes._

When they have sex this time, it is like the last. Not overly smooth, not practiced, not yet comfortable. They are a pair of awkward dorks; Oliver knows this to be true.

Unlike last time, Oliver has now seen quite a bit of homosexual pornography. Oliver knows what it’s supposed to look like, a little better. He’d thought it would help, but it doesn’t. Like last time, absolutely nothing can adequately prepare him for Elio’s beauty.

He gets the awful sweatpants off him, there on the couch. Elio isn’t wearing anything underneath. It's a simple, easy thing, to take Elio's cock in his mouth, to let it get hard there against the very gentle pressure he applies. 

It doesn't take very long, but Oliver revels in it all the same. This, he knows he can do. He does not even have to try. Barring the truly bizarre and the most obvious exclusions, like biting down, there really is no such thing as a bad blowjob.

Elio lets him be good, lets him luxuriate in it for a moment, before he's stopping him. "Feels good. Feels _incredible._ But I don't wanna come like this, Oliver."

He pulls away. "Why not? There's no peach this time, why won't you let me taste you?" 

Elio huffs at him, embarrassed all over again, and shoves at Oliver's collarbone with a foot. Oliver ends up on his back on the rug, and Elio follows him down. "Don't you _want_ to get laid? You should be nicer to me," he warns.

"I was being _very_ nice to you," Oliver reasons. "Also, yes I do, but you're always in such a rush, baby. You rushed with Marzia, flaunted it just to make me mad, you vile little imp. Now, we've waited all summer and it hasn't dampened your desire at all."

Elio peers at Oliver again, from where he's straddling him. "You made me feel behind, like you were biking ahead. I wanted to catch up to you. I wanted to learn, and be good for you. I wanted to know what it was like," Elio explains readily, as if these are things Oliver should already know. 

He begins working at the placket of Oliver's khaki shorts. Oliver lifts his hips a little to help, absently, considering all that he's been told. 

"And you thought getting inside Marzia would prepare you for me doing the same to you? Talk me through that one, _mon mec."_

“I thought sex was sex, to be honest. I figured it would help a little,” Elio all but mumbles.

Oliver tries to laugh at him but is silenced by a kiss that is forceful and sweet, all at once. Elio isn’t who he was, isn’t the young man who had stared adoringly, eyes glazed, waiting for Oliver to take. He isn’t a statue to be studied and desired, fixed in the mind, or consumed by the eyes and then put away to keep from the ravages of time. Elio is no smooth-cheeked thing; he even has a bit of stubble, this late in the day.

Oliver thrills to it, putting his fingers in Elio’s hair and letting his breath raise him up to meet in the middle, a natural levity to their proceedings. He didn’t know it could be like this. What Elio says makes a sudden sense: sometimes you don’t know what it is that you don’t know.

Still, he picks up the thread of conversation after pulling back. “They’re nothing alike, you know,” he tells Elio. “It’s different, being the… aggressor. The lover. And it’s different than whatever you played at with Marzia, too.” Elio finishes divesting Oliver of his shorts, tossing them aside, and clambers back up the older man’s body to give him a sort of full-body hug, burying his face in Oliver’s shoulder. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” he adds.

“I know.”

The floor isn’t precisely comfortable. Oliver shudders, feeling out what he’s about to say next. “Do you want to try it?”

Elio’s fingers are at his jaw. “You mean now?” Elio sits up to look down at him.

“I trust you,” Oliver replies, and he finds the words sound true, out in the air like that.

The younger man gets to his feet, naked as a blue jay, and helps Oliver with a hand up. From there, it’s easy to lose his shirt on the way to the bed, easier still to lay down and feel the sheets underneath him, warm from a day in the sunshine. Elio never makes his bed.

When Oliver is touched next, it’s very light. He almost mistakes it for an early autumn breeze coming in from the window that doesn’t close quite right.

Then there is a shock of oil pouring into the divot of his spine, and it lights up his nerves but Oliver stays still. He trusts. “Is that olive oil?” is all he asks, and even that is idle.

He can practically hear the shy little face Elio makes when he explains. “Yeah… thought it would be, you know. Hellenistic,” he says even as he rubs it into Oliver’s back, massaging even the part just underneath his shoulder blades that always hurts from hunching. “It’s good for your skin.”

“You’re good for my skin,” Oliver replies nonsensically, just to keep their banter going. Elio smooths the last bits of oil down his back, and then thumbs over his ass. Oliver holds perfectly still. “I’m sorry I didn’t do this for you,” he says quietly.

Elio, for his part, sounds just as affected, just as lost in memory. “It was better that way, with just spit. I wanted nothing that was not from your mouth, your hands, your body.” He settles next to Oliver, puts his mouth to Oliver’s shoulder as he uses long pianist’s fingers to continue relaxing the ring of muscle slicked in oil. They mostly rub and tease, then one dips in, withdrawing quickly. Oliver breathes, and lets himself be sunk into on the next exhale.

It’s not actually that much to take in, not really. Elio’s fingers are as long and slim as his cock, Oliver knows. Still, he fights not to tense up against the strangeness of the sensation. He wants his anxiety to just melt away. He wants to be good.

“You’re warm,” Elio informs him. “Inside, I mean.”

“Ninety-eight point six,” he quips. “Hopefully.”

Elio leans into him, almost half on top of Oliver’s back now, and adds a second massaging finger. He reaches deeper. “You don’t have to be perfect,” he murmurs. “Just tell me when it feels good.”

“It all feels good,” Oliver admits, but he knows what Elio means. “It always feels good with you,” he reiterates, even as his hips begin a hitching sort of rhythm against the bed, forward, and back against Elio’s slim strength, behind.

“That’s how I feel too,” the younger man says simply, as if it could really be that simple. “I want you to feel what I feel.” He twists his fingers minutely. Not too much, just enough to search.

“I-” Oliver starts, but is cut off.

“Stop worrying. Stop putting yourself down. You have nothing to do here; nothing is to be done. Be kind to yourself, and me. Relax.”

Oliver buries his face into the mass of rucked up blankets. The pillow is long lost. It is easy to breathe through damp cotton, when it smells of home. It’s not quite as easy to breathe through blinding pleasure, when Elio’s search inside his body is rewarded, but he tries valiantly.

“Good _Lord_ -”

And he is laughed at. “See how generous I can be? I could have saved the knowledge of that sensation all to myself.”

Oliver pulls himself away indignantly. He turns over, upsetting Elio’s delicate tangle of limbs. _Good,_ he thinks. “You never did learn to share.”

The other man re-situates himself as Oliver watches, and reaches for more oil.

“Do it again,” Oliver bids him. Elio glances pointedly at what he’s doing.

“Hold your horses, or I’ll hold them for you,” Elio threatens.

Oliver hooks a muscled leg around his lover and pulls him forward. “Don’t play at the disciplinarian. Just don’t. Doesn’t suit you. Also, I didn’t mean for you to do it with your fingers.”

What he gets in return for his candor is something familiar… Elio like a startled deer, eyes wide and ready to run. “Oh,” he says.

And then, after a moment, “Rubber, d’you think? S’a good idea or a bad idea?”

Oliver closes his eyes, though not to think about it. Rather, he thinks instead how the question hadn’t even come up, in Italy. He will never again consider himself a good steward of anyone else’s body, though he grants himself that what he lacks in forethought he makes up for in passion. What he says, though, is, “Comme tu veux, mon coeur,” because yes. He’s skipped right past _où est la salle de bain?_ and _je voudrais un verre de l’eau_ to get straight to the romantic things he wants Elio to hear in every language he knows. “Je te fais confiance,” he adds.

In case the message is lost in the code-switch, Oliver busies himself with pulling at Elio’s prick in long, oiled strokes. It seems expedient, and also he very, very much wants to.

With that kind of motivation, it isn’t long before Elio is nudging closer to him, pushing his hands up Oliver’s body worshipfully, until he is all but seated. Oliver doesn’t tell him it’s okay or anything like that, knows that it’s important that Elio make up his mind and do things in his own time. He just waits. The most he does to sway his lover one way or the other is just stretch his quads out a little more, make just that extra breath of room for Elio to enter him.

If this is what it is to be beloved, Oliver thinks he might be rather good at it.

He also thinks, hazily, as his world is narrowed to one point of penetration, to just that and Elio’s hands—one each at his waist and the crook of his shoulder—that Elio is better than him.

And for once he doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize to anyone who came here horny, for the fade to black. I ended up watching the movie about 10 times in order to write this emotional affair between them properly and with the right atmosphere, and by that time it had struck me how very nonexplicit the movie is, in some ways, while being very raw in others, and in the end I just couldn't sully that.
> 
> **But if you want the outtake, it's[here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338022).**


End file.
